Posted 6:52 PM by Gene

My downloading mania led me to YouTube of all places to capture the marvelous 1961 theme song of To Tell the Truth (not stereo, very unfortunately). A man with the peculiar name of Robert Cobert (how do you pronounce it?) wrote it, and though he's better known for the daytime gothic soap opera Dark Shadows and some miniseries to me he will always live through his themes for Password, and this one, yes, very much of a kind with the stock music of its day*, but also a kind of instrumental version of that masterpiece "The Trolley Song", itself a reason to live. Just to hear it would have overpowered the bottles of Geritol hawked on the show. Only now do we know just how good some TV themes were. "To Tell the Truth" was buried with low-fi speakers and audience applause and Johnny Olson's yammering and promos, and it never played beyond halfway through the song. Partly for that we thought of Carl Stalling and Vic Mizzy and Alexander Courage as hacks, and dismissed them as no better than the hack work they accompanied -- no doubt the composers dismissed themselves too. Of course it's hard to look at that picture of the original Superman and Tom Poston and Mrs. Hart and Orson Bean, Peggy Cass unaccountably missing (and all dead save for Bean, now in his eighties and forever known as a sex quack), and not feel the pang of remorse for the past, which steeps those old themes even more savorly. And those who overpraise our current musical genius should know that it may not have the minimal excellence to save it from the future.

*If you want to hear stock music listen to the original theme from 1956. And a lot of that music didn't deserve the ignominy of television either -- and a lot of it wasn't stock music.